Today at a strategy meeting Enix finally announced the eighth installment of its highly successful Dragon Quest series. Not so surprisingly, the game will be released for PlayStation 2. What is surprising though is the fact that Enix is cooperating on the game's development with Level 5, known for their PS2 games Dark Cloud and Dark Chronicle as well as True Fantasy Live Online for Xbox. The company had previously been working with Heartbeat on the last few Dragon Quest games, but Heartbeat went out of business a few months ago.

Yuuji Horii will once again be responsible for the scenario and game design, Akira Toriyama will be the character designer and Kouichi Sugiyama will compose the soundtrack. Like previous Level 5 creations, the game will have a comic feel to it, created through toon shading techniques.

Dragon Quest VIII has yet to receive a release date or pricing, although Enix previously had mentioned that the game will be released sometime in 2004.